One question about hiring control decided which defendant walked and which one stays
A national nonprofit escaped a New Jersey abuse suit for one reason: it never controlled who the local club hired.
New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled on August 19, 2026 that the state's courts had no authority over the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the national body that sits above local Boys and Girls Clubs. The legal term is personal jurisdiction - a court's power to hear a case against a specific defendant. For HR leaders who run franchise or chapter-based networks, the outcome came down to a familiar question: who actually controls the people on the ground?
Nine plaintiffs, named only by their initials, said a part-time counselor at the Boys and Girls Club of Hudson County sexually abused them as boys between 1976 and 1984. The opinion noted that the counselor was later charged with 493 counts of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 20 years. The plaintiffs argued the national organization had been negligent by not requiring the policies and training that might have stopped the abuse.
The national body was chartered by Congress, incorporated in the District of Columbia and headquartered in Georgia. It had never run a club, hired staff or owned property in New Jersey. It did give the local club sample programs, budgeting help and training, and it required the club to put the national name and logo on "everything." In exchange, the club paid yearly dues.
Those were genuine ties to the state, the court agreed. But they did not "arise out of or relate to" the abuse claims. The point that matters for HR: the national body did not decide who the local club hired, trained, supervised or fired. Local clubs, the court found, "solely hire, evaluate, and train their employees." A senior national executive testified that even if head office had learned a club was employing a convicted sex offender, it "did not have the authority" to make the club remove him.
The court also refused to treat a failure to write safety policies as reaching into the state. Accept that, it cautioned, and the national body could be dragged into court anywhere a local club caused harm.
A dissenting justice would have kept the case alive, noting the national body marketed its clubs as "safe haven[s]" and built its membership rules around child safety.
None of this decided whether anyone was negligent. The plaintiffs sued under a 2019 New Jersey law that lets abuse survivors file until they turn 55, and the court said their claims would still be heard in the state - just not against the national organization. The local club remains a defendant.
